Thursday, April 19, 2012

650b Soma

If you're into this sort of thing you probably know that were big fans of the 650b wheel size over here at Soma. After all we came out with the B-side, our 650b hard tail mountain bike frame way back in 2009. You might not know that many of our other frames work great with 650b wheels.

Our lugged road frame the Stanyan will swallow 650Bx38mm tires with room for fenders. Back when it was still called the speedster Ed 650Bradly over at bikeman.com built one up with 650Bs. even thoguh it was from all the way back in 2007 I still love to look at this build. So nice.

http://www.bikeman.com/bikeman-blogs/650blog/

You can fit 650b wheels on every size of the Buena Vista mixte. Here's on built up by the intrepid 650bers at FreeRange Cycles in Seattle.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69421720@N02/

People have also sucessufly converted the Doublecross DC and the ES to 650b. And of course the smaller sizes of the San Marco are build specifically for 650b wheels.


These tire are great for when you want a little more cush on your ride, but you're not necessarily going offroading. There are a number of great 650b options on the market now, in including the Soma New Xpress and B-Line (soon to be available in Terracotta), and the Parimoto from Pacenti. They can be found here http://store.somafab.com/tires1.html or at your local bike shop.
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7 comments:

  1. Mark @ GRAVELBIKE.comApril 19, 2012 at 8:38 PM

    Please consider making the B-Lines with black sidewalls (non-Hypertex).

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 20, 2012 at 8:36 AM

    I'd love to see you make a production, road-specific, low trail geometry bike for 650bx42 tires with fenders from lightweight steel tubing. Nobody is doing this right now. Rawland gets the lightweight steel and production angle but the geometry is more all-arounder and the clearance for knobbies is overkill for the road. Boulder nails it though it's arguably more of a semi-custom bike than a true off the shelf production bike plus it breaks the $1000 price point. Kogswell came close though they couldn't decide if they wanted the bike to be a porteur or a randonneur which makes no sense - it's like saying you want to be a cyclocross bike and a touring bike. The two may look similar but they need to meet very different demands and as a result you get a bike that is decent at both while excelling at neither.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousApril 22, 2012 at 2:19 PM

    I too would love to see a low trail650b frame and fork from SOMA. I bet you would sell a bunch of them!

    Cheers,
    Chris

    ReplyDelete
  4. StanApril 23, 2012 at 9:27 AM

    We've got some buns in the oven...

    ReplyDelete
  5. claroscuroApril 28, 2012 at 5:46 PM

    Could a Juice be runwith 650b wheels??

    ReplyDelete
  6. StanApril 30, 2012 at 9:38 AM

    @claroscuro It could, but you would drop the BB a little bit.

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownMarch 24, 2013 at 1:11 PM

    Has anyone converted a larger San Marcos for 650b? I'm doing a similar project on a 1982 Trek 612(maybe a 720)... I love the cushy ride.

    ReplyDelete

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